The proliferation of Internet access and network providers has confronted users with an array of communications, messaging and other services. Users who elect to use or subscribe to communications services or channels may be forced to track a volume of traffic which they receive, in the form for example of instant messaging, email messages, notifications when listed “buddies” come online, download notifications and other messages or notifications. That traffic may arrive at times when the user is away from their computer, is busy with other programs or tasks, when programs or tasks are minimized or otherwise executing in a background mode, or other occasions when the user can not immediately receive, read, act on or respond to the given notice or notices.
In response to that tracking task, technologies have evolved such as those illustrated in FIG. 1 in which a set of message objects may be presented to the user in a unobtrusive, compact form along a notification bar, for instance in a graphical user interface, including for example a task bar or side bar. In such interfaces, a series of messages, alerts, notifications or other messages or objects may be collected in a sliding queue of icons which represent individual notifications as they are received. In cases that sliding queue may place newly received messages or notifications at the left most point in the display section or panel, and as new notification items are received the preceding objects may move to the left or in other directions indicating the uniform passage of time. In this fashion a user may collect and view a set of notifications in order of receipt, at times they choose and without interruption of other tasks.
However, sliding queues for these types of notifications or other objects are not without certain disadvantages. For one, in platforms which deliver a sliding message queue, each message takes a place along the timeline and is moved out along that timeline at points which are evenly spaced according to the date and time which those messages are received. Thus relatively old messages or other objects may extend to the far end of the available notification bar, while new messages drop in at the other end but the temporal relationship between those extremes and messages in between may not be clear to users. For example, the user may not be able to tell from the spacing of the string of message notifications or other objects which items came in within the last hour or day, or which are several days old and therefore more likely to be obsolete. Moreover, on a notifications bar which is generated in a sidebar interface, the number of pixels available to depict the set of objects may not be large. That interface can therefore relatively quickly fill up with notification objects, after which oldest objects may, for example, have to drop off, even when those objects are comparatively recent and the user may still wish to access them.
Further, in known notifications technology the message or other objects which are captured to the notifications bar may simply remain informational in nature. That is, the displayed notification icon may indicate a date and time at which the object was received, but may not be able to be highlighted, selected, hovered over, clicked on or otherwise activated, for instance to reveal a dialog box or other request for input which may, for example, have arrived with or been part of the original underlying object or message. Other problems in current messaging and notification technology exist.